Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday January 20, 2014 @05:18PM
from the getting-to-the-bottom-of-things dept.

First time accepted submitter GPS Pilot writes "Previous reports said the rock that suddenly appeared out of nowhere was merely 'the size of a jelly doughnut.' Now, a color image shows additional reasons for this metaphor: 'It's white around the outside, in the middle there's kind of a low spot that's dark red,' said lead scientist Steve Squyres. In the image, the object does stick out like a sore thumb amidst the surrounding orange rocks and soil. Its composition is 'like nothing we've ever seen before. It's very high in sulfur, it's very high in magnesium, it's got twice as much manganese as we've ever seen in anything on Mars.'"

Notice that scuff mark in the lower left corner of the Pic 2, and find the same location inPic 1. (Its diagonally down and to the right of the "bald eagle head shot" in Pic 1.)

A little trench has been exposed, dirt turned over and some material is missing. A rock is clearly missing from this hole.Could the rock have been un-Marsed from this hole by a wheel, and thrown that far, landing it upside down such that we see an un-weathered surface? Not saying for sure this is where it came from, (hole looks a little small), but a simple widefield view will probably reveal similar candidate sources.

I Hope JPL holds off on releasing any new imagery until the conspiracy nut jobs work their way into a screaming lather. The deflation is so much more fun that way,

A bit of dry ice forms in a crack in a stone and stays below freezing for a day or a million years before a rover tyre moves some soil and exposes it to the heat of the sun. The dry ice sublimates but instead of earth water's slow process of expanding and cracking a rock, sublimated dry ice occasionally pops a rock shard quite a long distance. Like pop-rocks.

Pop rock manufacture (from Wikipedia):
The candy is made by mixing its ingredients and heating them until they melt into a syrup, then exposing the mix

I counter instead of getting kicked up, which would imply either getting caught in the tread or slippage in traction throwing the rock, the rock rolled inside the wheel well and got carried on the inside of the hub and rolled back out and into it's new mystical resting spot.

One of the linked articles suggests they have analized the make up of the rock and find it quite different from the surrounding rocks, so some weight is given to the theory that it maybe it bounced in from impact, maybe miles away.

The Mars rovers have examined thousands of rocks. If this were just some random rock kicked into position by one of the rover's wheels, it's highly improbable that it would also be "like nothing we've ever seen before."

Then good news! After the Star trek reboot, warp drive will no longer be necessary! In the first movie, we saw a successful transport to a ship in warp. Warp drive moves a ship nice and fast when it's working, so that's a huge range increase. In the second film we saw a transport from Earth to Kronos. Warp is out, transporters are in. The only ships that will be required in the future will be the ones that construct new (small) starbases to receive and re-transport people to any destination that is ou

If I were in charge of the reboot, I would have had one time travel episode: The Pilot. Instead of [shudder]Red Matter, Ambassador Spock, on Romulus promoting unification, gets sick (perhaps Bendii syndrome like his father), and during a mind link winds up revealing the secret of the Guardian of Forever to the bad guys. They use it to bring modern weapons tech and bring about the Federation/Romulan war. Earth loses. Spock (Nimoy) goes back to try to correct it, get's it mostly right, but dies in the

My understanding is that they've never seen the underside of a Martian rock.

So... those scoop arms on the Viking landers, and the Phoenix lander didn't turn over any Martian rocks? Not one? And not one overturned rock in the miles of tracks left by Pathfinder, Spirit (with it's dragging wheel), Opportunity Curiosity?

Almost everyone has assumed that if aliens ever show up that it would be a big show: "We come in peace. Take us to your leader" Or, if not that, then something like, "We've been here watching for decades | hundreds | thousands of years." I don't think anyone ever considers it possible that an alien presence would be revealed by a prank to be followed by the intergalactic equivalent of Nelson's "Ha ha! [youtube.com]" or "You guys are a hoot! You're our favorite 4D TV show!" Well, it beats being eaten.

Sometimes a rock is just a rock, could had ended there because winds, a chain reaction caused by the rover, even a small asteroid hitting the planet and spreading pebbles around is easier to happen than life forms moving it.

The Unmanned Space Flight forums have some better images than most you'll see on the standard snews sites. There are at least two rocks and some sand that has appeared in the image. That's on the uphill side of the rover, it's likely that this stuff rolled down the hill. What started it rolling is unknown, of course.

That's what all the hullabaloo is about? It looks like a rock. It looks just like all of the rocks around it. Evidently the spectrograph claims it isn't made like the others but personally I would have just passed that one by. Guess that's why I don't make the big bucks.

They're rocks that weren't there the day before, **that's** what the hullabaloo is a about. It's not like Earth, where stuff is moving around all the time and a rabbit or squirrel could just randomly kick it into view. They have no idea how they got there, it's a shock that they saw anything move, much less a rock this big, ore for that matter two of them.

Wow that picture looks a lot more like a meteorite than I expected. I am not sure about the crater ejecta theory but it might well be a rock which hit the ground at terminal velocity and bounced off the rover. Objects like the rover would tend to accumulate little objects like stones around them becuse they get in the way of bouncing objects. This happens a lot on the moon where big rocks have little scree sloped of debris around them.

If you look at numerous images, you can tell what happened with basic physics. Before the "magic" rock shows up, there is an image of a small protrusion which is a bit pointy, let us call it "horn" shaped for ease in dialogue. You can also see after the "magic" rock hows up, this point is moved from it's original location and is facing a different direction. So the "horn" shaped rock could have tiddly winked the bigger rock we are calling the magical "jelly donut" or it could have been part of the same r

Sometimes a rock is just a rock, could had ended there because winds, a chain reaction caused by the rover, even a small asteroid hitting the planet and spreading pebbles around is easier to happen than life forms moving it.

The one thing it couldn't be is wind -- air is far too thin. Dust moves, but even in massive wind, bigger rocks wont.

The wind on Mars is not "strong" enough to move rocks on the surface. Even though winds on Mars can probably reach large speeds, the atmospheric density is so low, that the force the wind can impose on a rock is quite small. For instance, a wind of 10 meters per second (about 20 miles per hour) here on Earth produces a force which is four times stronger than does a 50 meter per second wind (a bit more than 100 miles per hour) on the surface of Mars. So, since a 20 mile per hour wind here on Earth does not generally move rocks about on the surface (though it does raise dust), the winds on Mars don't move rocks on the surface either.

A fun experiment can be done in the flight simulator X-Plane. It can simulate flying in the Martian enviornment. I haven't messed around with it, but from what I hear you need to get going about 600 kts in an airplane with giant wings that put the U2 to shame just to get off the ground.

Physics is a bitch... Change 1 tiny thing like pressure and it screws with everything else!

I suppose there could be bits of the bus and heat shield of Opportunity lying around the place, but that doesn't explain the sudden appearance. My other thought is that this is a bit of crud which the rover picked up during the landing and dropped during a manoevour. We have pictures of the top deck of the rover, but they can't show the whole vehicle.

So this rock moved when we weren't looking at it... Do you realize what this means? It's a Weeping Angel! Get that rover out of there now! (But don't look away. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead.)

No, it's their cousin species, the Weeping Jelly Doughnuts, who are much less of a menace to the universe. Instead of zapping you back in time 80 years and feeding on your residual potential, they zap you back in time to last Tuesday, where you eagerly devour an unwitting jelly doughnut that will now never get a chance to zap you back in time to last Tuesday, thus creating a paradox and canceling its own existence. There's a reason they're all but extinct.

The only way to be absolutely sure that the rock was "flipped" by the wheel, is to run it over again (and again, and again) and see where it goes. I personally don't think it's likely. So it's either the result of vulcanism, or it's a meteor.

If you look in the photo provided by CNN in the article, look at the rock which casts a shadow near the top left corner of the photo.

That same rock is there in the newer photo with the donut-rock. Now, just look down a little bit and slight right you will see a darker spot that wasn't that dark in the earlier picture and it appears to cast a shadow. Therefore, there are more rocks (at least two) that weren't there before.

I've done a very quick animated gif:
https://imgflip.com/gif/69vpc [imgflip.com]
If you see the circled area, that looks like the area the rock has come from, probably flicked there by the front wheels?

that eventually our existence as a species will depend upon having colonies there

wrong.

the most inhospitable places on earth are like paradise compared to mars. conditions on earth would need to get much, much worse before we'd break even. the root of our problem here is scarce resources. that's not going to magically go away on mars. it's going to be much, much worse. growing food? can't just walk outside and plant something. you have to find water, that's frozen under the surface, thaw it, and pipe it to the sealed, heated, and completely environmentally controlled habitat. even the s

I was referring to any problems of global catastrophe like the Earth being hit by a big rock, which will eventually happen. The long term survival of humans will require us to expand into the galaxy, presumably starting with Mars.

The folks at NASA are remotely controlling a roving "SUV" on a planet millions of miles away from us in a scientific effort to learn more about the Universe and our surroundings. Does this impact day-to-day life *right now*? No, of course not. Is it incredibly cool and deserve a spot on Slashdot's home page? Definitely. Are your endeavors even close to this scale of technological achievement? (I'll be the first to admit that my own endeavors, while important to me, don't rise to the level of technical

It just boggles the mind how eager everyone is to go along with NASA's hype about the mission, to the point here of giving time here to the event of a rock getting popped up in the air by the Rover and landing upside down.

In fairness, people got almost as excited by a tunnel boring machine in Seattle hitting a forgotten pipe.

From religion to aliens to ghost-hunters, people just want to find something that suggests that, in this mind-bogglingly large universe, our species doesn't count as the sole intel

The rover rolled over the rock, in doing so it flipped the rock up into one of the wheel wells, it rolled in the well as the rover moved forward until it rolled out and into it's new resting place. Mystery solved.